What support have you and your family needed?

If you live in the world of SEN and Disability, you will hear stories of children and young people in residential units and assessment treatment units, far from their families. You will hear stories of families in crisis.

As you read them, do you think “I hope that never happens to us” or maybe even “that will never happen to us”.

How many of the families who are now in that position do you think thought the very same?

So what can we do?

We know that local services are sometimes not able to give families and their young with complex needs the support they need to prevent them going into crisis. Or perhaps it is more that the families don’t know about the local services or the local services are under-funded.

We launched Justice Together after we had seen too many families struggle with difference stages of their loved one life, because there was no robust support in place for them and even when the support was available, families didn’t know it existed.

We are now looking at taking Justice Together from an online database to the next step in addressing this and actually organising and providing the much needed support. However, we cannot do this alone so we have joined up with the much respected charity Respond and a group of family members and others to look at how we do this.

What do Respond do?

Respond works with children and adults with learning disabilities who have experienced abuse or trauma, as well as those who have abused others, through psychotherapy, advocacy, campaigning and other support. Respond also aims to prevent abuse by providing training, consultancy and research.

Respond were awarded a grant from the Department of Health to provide a helpline, family support sessions and individual assessments following the Panorama expose of the abuse at Winterbourne. They are already supporting some families and have so much experience and knowledge in this area, we are absolutely thrilled to be working with them on the Justice Together project.

How can you help?

However, in order to take this forward, we need to apply for more funding and to help us, we would really appreciate families taking 5/10 minutes to complete this quick survey. This survey will help us get the evidence we need for us to try and do something that will prevent this happening to future families. We want to learn from the families who have been unable to get the best support needed to keep their children within their communities and learn from those who may be struggling.

All responses will be in total confidence and will help us gather evidence for the next stage of Justice Together.